Pulse Check: Azar to drug plan critics: Bring on the fight

HHS Secretary Alex Azar has a message for critics of the Trump administration's plan to lower drug prices: Bring it on.

Drugmakers, pharmacy benefit managers and some physician groups have spent a week taking shots at the new effort — a reprise of how the industries banded together to stop a similar Obama-era initiative in 2016. On POLITICO’s “Pulse Check” podcast, Azar encouraged the players to engage with the administration.

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“I hope that any part of these various industries … that they will come to the table with constructive solutions,” Azar said on the podcast. “But if they don’t, that ain't going to stop us. We are moving forward.”

Azar joined President Donald Trump last week to announce the long-awaited plan, which includes proposals to change how private insurers negotiate Medicare drug prices and numerous open questions, like whether to require pharma companies to post the full “list price” of drugs in their advertising.

While the plan was criticized by Democrats as insufficient and met with a shrug on Wall Street — drugmakers’ stock prices went up, and an Evercore analyst called the proposals “benign” — Azar said the reaction ignored the long-term potential of HHS’ ideas.

“Even stock analysts, who are really quite smart individuals generally, totally missed the boat here,” he said. “People need to do a bit more reading and looking, listening and understanding.”

Meanwhile, industry groups have started sounding alarms. The Community Oncology Alliance on Wednesday said that cancer doctors are worried that the Trump plan will harm patient care, echoing concerns they raised when the Obama administration tried to lower drug prices — an effort that failed in late 2016.

On the podcast, the HHS secretary said that Trump has remained laser-focused on his campaign promise to lower drug prices — “I have not had a single phone call or meeting with the president where drug pricing is not top of the agenda,” Azar said — and willing to disregard industry complaints.

“I have the complete support of the president in stiffening my spine and fighting back against the special interests here to drive this change,” Azar said, referencing that Andy Slavitt — who ran CMS in the Obama administration — commented the secretary will have to withstand pressure coming from multiple directions.

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While Trump didn’t include several campaign pledges in his final drug plan, like allowing the importation of drugs from Canada or fully empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices, Azar reiterated that he doesn't think those ideas — which he's referred to as "gimmicks" — sufficiently address the trend of rising U.S. drug prices.

"I'm a solution-oriented person trying to drive results," he said, adding that the Trump plan is "not some gimmick. Not to make a headline."

Azar also addressed comments that he made on Monday on the “Hugh Hewitt” radio show, when he suggested that the media was negatively influencing coverage of the drug plan and that HHS would "have to fight through and around them."

Azar walked back his criticism on POLITICO's podcast. “What I said was that I don't think that the media wants the president to be viewed as succeeding ... in connection with this,” Azar said. “I tend to generally believe people have a good intent.”

On the podcast, Azar listed four major goals: lowering the list prices of drugs, negotiating better prices in Medicare Part B and Part D, reducing patients’ out-of-pocket spending on drugs and encouraging foreign countries to “pay more of their fair share” in pharma research and development. But he said critics should hold off before rendering judgment, given the complexity of those changes.

“This is going to be a multi-year constant effort,” Azar said. “We are rewiring an entire sector of the American economy here.”

Azar — who was formerly the U.S. president of Eli Lilly — said he’s happy to burn bridges in the pharma industry if that leads to lower drug prices.

“I really don't care, honestly,” Azar said, discussing the looming battles with his old colleagues. “I'm here to serve the American people in this job,” he added. “That is the only thing that I care about.”

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